On The Third Day: Review

27th July 2022

Cecilia Amato (Mariana Anghileri) and her son, Martin (Octavio Belmonte) are the unfortunate victims of a car crash which leaves Cecilia’s car spinning off the road. Three days later Cecilia wakes up in hospital and is given the horrific news that her son is dead.

Meanwhile, Enrigque (Gerardo Romano) has taken a young woman hostage and is about to do terrible things to her. It’s clear that Enrique is up to no good, but what does it have to do with Cecilia and will they ever meet? They’re clearly on different trajectories and may as well be in different movies, but something will surely connect them.

On The Third Day (or Al Tercer Día) is a Spanish horror movie that’s exclusive to Shudder. Possibly trying to evoke the kinds of supernatural horror movies that they don’t make anymore, The Third Day has a number of elements which may seemingly work if they were executed properly. Unfortunately, in this case it seems they were not.

Firstly, somewhere along the way it was decided that the movie would be dubbed into English. This also means that whereas dubbing could be a seamless and easily translatable experience, in this case the production may have not had the budget for the right actors, least of all the right direction.

This leads to unintentionally funny moments where flashbacks show Martin being remarkably articulate for his age and his mother’s delivery being very dull and flat.

Also, as mentioned earlier there may be some attempt at evoking horror movies of time gone by, but the use of crash zooms and stilted dialogue again only adds to the unintentional comedy. There’s also the fact that there is so little connection between Cecilia’s ordeal in the hospital and whatever Jose is doing that when the link is revealed, it may have been two different movies anyway. Particularly where Jose’s storyline is more interesting than Cecilia’s and it’s treated like a subplot.

You may have to be in a certain kind of mood to watch The Third Day and for those who are looking for something totally misjudged with accidental humour then go ahead. Otherwise chalk it up to another bad decision by Shudder.

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